Karma Cream (Gainesville FL)

“Hallmark Holidays” have never been a big deal for us, and Valentine’s Day is no exception. However, we had no plans to visit state parks today, had been looking for a day to visit the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville, needed to make a visit to Walmart, and wanted to try one of the vegan-friendly restaurants in Gainesville, so Valentine’s Day provided the needed excuse to do all of that in the same trip. Before I go on, I am including a picture of us taken by Marian Hagan on our outing with her and John to the two Crystal River state parks last Sunday.

Us at Crystal River Buffer Preserve State Park. (Photo by Marian Hagan.)

We selected The Jones Eastside which was open all day serving breakfast and lunch, and was staying open for dinner. We can usually find acceptable food for lunch and dinner if we are thoughtful about our choice of restaurant, but breakfast is often limited to dry toast with jam and/or fresh fruit. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but also nothing special about it. At The Jones Eastside, however, we were able to order a tofu scramble with sides of potatoes and fruit and a stack of vegan flax seed pancakes with fresh blueberries and real maple syrup. We split each dish in half and had a really nice breakfast. The Jones Eastside was highly recommended on both HappyCow.com and Yelp.com, and deservedly so. It’s a quaint little place using organic ingredients and providing attentive service; you go for the food, not for an upscale setting.

From The Jones Eastside we drove through the heart of downtown Gainesville to where we thought the Florida Museum of Natural History was located. We enjoyed seeing the non-university part of town, and parts of the UF central campus, but the museum was not where I thought it was. Our Garmin 465T GPS did, however, and we followed its directions into a major traffic jam. We had been to Gainesville several times, but had not seen traffic like this before.

We found the museum, paid $4 to park, and went in. Admission was free except for the Butterfly Rainforest and special exhibits. We spent a couple of hours exploring the free exhibits and plan to return for the Butterflies and a special exhibit titled “Wolf to Woof” on the evolution of the domestic dog. Like most serious museums, you could spend days here depending on the level of detail you wanted to absorb.

By the time we were done at the museum it was 4 PM. Our Valentine’s Day still needed something “sweet” so we headed to Karma Cream for vegan ice cream. We fought our way (slowly) through more terrible traffic, but it was worth it. 🙂

“GPS, find us a Walmart, please.” It showed two in Gainesville so I picked the closer one just up the street. It was closed, the building vacant. 🙁 So I selected the other one on SW Archer (US-24). We routed ourselves over to FL-121 southbound which intersects Archer close to the Walmart. YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE ON THIS ROAD DURING AFTERNOON RUSH HOUR, which is actually “hope you’re not in a rush” hour. Truthfully, you do not want to be in Gainesville during the evening rush hour. Period. End of story. Total gridlock. Fortunately we were not in a rush to be anywhere in particular by any certain time so we only had to deal with our self-imposed frustration at being stuck in traffic. It won’t happen again, at least not in Gainesville.

We eventually got to the Walmart (thank goodness they are open 24/7). We do not go out of way to shop there, but it’s the only place locally where we can find Calgon Bath Beads which we mix with water and Pine Sol and add to our holding tanks. It is also where we bought our microwave popcorn popper and have to get the disposable cardboard heating discs that go in the bottom.

Shopping done, we had no choice but to venture back out into traffic. OK, we had a choice; we could have sat there for a couple of hours until traffic thinned. If we had been the least bit hungry we could have gotten something to eat while we waited, but having just had ice cream our appetites were satisfied. Fortunately we were close to the SW corner of Gainesville by now where FL-121 turns SSW and heads through the country to Williston. We arrived back at the RV resort after 6 PM, but there was no fire going in the fire pit.

WCRVR was having a Valentine’s Day dinner/dance starting at 5 PM so the Friday night fire had not been built by Kevin at its usual time as he and his wife had gone to the dinner/dance. But a short time later I noticed a flickering flame and went to investigate. Next door neighbors John and Ali had not gone to the dinner/dance either and John, being the backup fire guy, was getting one going. We opened our bottle of sparkling pink moscato, bundled up a bit against the cool evening air, and went over. Ali brought John’s guitar, the rocking chairs slowly filled up (~16 people), and we sang along when we knew the words. It was a lovely capstone to a very nice Valentine’s Day (traffic notwithstanding).

Having spent a long day Thursday visiting Pat and Vickie at Fort Wilderness, and with the weather still wet and cool, we stayed around our coach on Friday and relaxed. Linda worked on her cross stitch for much of the day. I did a load of laundry. We went for a walk around the RV resort. We met another group of campers from Michigan and stopped to chat briefly. Linda made her wonderful vegan pancakes for dinner and then we went to the fire pit at 6:30 PM. We visited briefly with Kevin, who is in charge of the fire pit, before he took off to play Texas Hold’em. John and Ali, our next door neighbors to the east, were there as they are every Friday and Saturday night. A few other folks showed up, but not as many as we have seen in past weeks, and they did not stay. By 8:30 PM it was just the four of us and we had a nice, long visit. Kevin came back after Texas Hold’em and visited for a little while before turning in. I’ve included a photo gallery at the end of this post rather than insert the photos inline.

This morning we awoke to temperatures in the upper 40’s with dense fog, but the forecast was for a high near 80 degrees with only a 30% chance of rain. We waited until noon for the temperatures to rise into the mid-60’s and then headed for Gainesville. We had two State Parks to check out plus some shopping to do.

Our first stop was the Devil’s Millhopper State Geological Park. A small park on the NW side of Gainesville, Florida the Devil’s Millhopper is a sinkhole to drains water back into the Florida aquifer. It is 500 feet across at the top and 120 feet deep. Water flows in from streams that become waterfalls, and seeps out of the steep side walls. A wooden staircase gets you from the top to the bottom and back up while keeping hikers from destroying the vegetation which leads to serious erosion.

About 6 miles farther west on the same road is the trailhead for the hiking trails in the southern section of the San Felasco Hammock Preserve State Park. The southern 2/3rds of the park is restricted to hiking only with over 12 miles of trail. The area is pine flatwoods, with sinkholes and ponds and was the site of a Spanish mission a long, long time ago. We went for a very pleasant three mile hike and rarely saw anyone else on the trail in spite of a very crowed parking lot at the trailhead.

My birthday is on Tuesday, and rather than make a special trip into Gainesville for dinner, we decided to dine out while we were there today. Our hike completed, we drove to Karma Cream, a vegan friendly ice cream / pastry / sandwich shop on the north edge of the University of Florida campus. We ordered a Tofurkey Rueben sandwich and a vegan “bacon” and Tofurkey club sandwich. We each had a half of each sandwich. Karma Cream has a good selection of non-dairy and dairy ice cream. Linda had chocolate peanut butter and I had a Sunday with Lunaberry ice cream, dark chocolate hot fudge, whip cream, and crushed peanuts; all vegan. Karma Cream is a hole-in-the-wall kind of place, staffed and patronized by college students many of whom had tattoos, but we enjoyed it. It has a four and half cow rating on Happy Cow, and we felt that was an accurate assessment.

Just around the corner from Karma Cream is the Gainesville Earth Origins organic market, so we did our weekly grocery shopping there rather than at the Publix supermarket. By the time we got back to our coach and put the groceries away it was time to go to the Saturday night campfire. Even though the humidity was high, the milder temperatures brought out the crowd. Jeff and John brought their guitars and played/sang some of their favorite country songs. While country I not our preferred genre, we appreciated their musicianship and willingness to entertain their fellow RVers. We can only sit for so long on hard chairs and made our exit from the campfire around 8:30 PM.